Magic
Magic in Shadows is real, it's powerful, and it's paid for in the caster's own body. Here's what the Aether is, the three ways people learn to shape it, and what happens when they reach for more than they can hold.
That force is the Aether. It infuses everything — living bodies, inert objects, the air between buildings at 3am. For those attuned to it, reality becomes negotiable. Like all negotiations, however, nothing comes freely.
Magic in NYTE City is not a gift. What it costs, and how much of that cost you can bear, is a question everyone who reaches for the Aether must answer eventually.
Who casts
Every person in NYTE City carries some spark of the Aether. Almost nobody develops it. Arcanists are the ones who made it their study and their trade, but they aren't the only people casting: a fixer with one reliable trick or a medic who learned to close a wound the fast way is working the same force, whatever they'd call it.
Casting takes a voice. Not volume, but sound: gag an Arcanist, drop them underwater, or silence the room, and the Aether doesn't answer.
The three disciplines
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Evocation
When In the moment
Aether shaped live, under pressure, into whatever the moment needs. The fastest magic there is, and the most dangerous: in the right hands it turns a fight, and in the wrong ones it turns on the caster.
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Enchantment
When Before the job
Spells worked into objects ahead of time, carried as Talismans until someone releases them. A Talisman doesn't care who holds it, which makes an Enchanter the one person who can make the whole crew a little harder to kill.
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Alchemy
When For keeps
Days of ritual and rare materials, for an Artifact where the magic isn't stored in the object. It's a property of the object now: a vest that closes its own holes, a sidearm that has never jammed and never will.
The Aether does not skip steps.
Five Domains
Spells are built from Glyphs, each one a shaped idea the Aether responds to, and Glyphs fall into five Domains. Chain more of them together and the spell does more, and gets harder to hold.
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Elements
- Fire
- Lightning
- Water
- Air
- Earth
Raw force: heat, current, pressure, impact. The most legible magic to cast, and the most legible to see coming.
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Force
- Shockwave
- Gravity
- Barrier
- Telekinesis
- Distortion
Moving things, or stopping them. Leverage, and in NYTE City leverage is worth more than firepower most nights.
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Matter
- Stone
- Metal
- Wood
- Glass
- Flesh
What things are made of, and changing it. Healing lives here, if the person inside the flesh cooperates.
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Mind
- Fear
- Compulsion
- Illusion
- Insight
- Memory
Belief, perception and memory. It leaves no physical trace, but the target almost always knows something happened.
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Soul
- Decay
- Wrath
- Vitality
- Spirit
- Binding
The force that animates living things. It's the Domain that makes people uncomfortable, which is usually a sign that it works.
What it costs
Every caster has a limit, and it's called Tolerance. It isn't health. It's how much Aether the body can take being forced through it before it stops cooperating.
Reach for more than you can shape and the spell overreaches: the Aether collapses back through you, and Tolerance pays for it. Run out and you're Exhausted, unable to cast until you've rested. Push past empty and it gets worse. The Aether that couldn't be absorbed breaks through instead, and what it leaves behind doesn't always heal.
Get it right, and the Aether you pulled through doesn't go to waste: a spell that lands with room to spare does more than it was asked to.
The Aether leaves marks
Magic doesn't clean up after itself. A spell leaves Resonance behind, on the caster and in the place it was cast: scorch patterns no torch makes, a thread of something hanging in the air. Anyone who knows how to look can read it.
Arcanists keep their spells in a grimoire, and it has to be written by hand, because a photo of a Glyph is just a photo.
In a city that keeps everything and forgets nothing, Arcanists carry paper.